The term data integrity refers to maintaining and assuring the accuracy of data. The opposite of data integrity is data corruption. Data corruption generally leads to data losses. Data integrity may be an important aspect to the design, implementation and usage of any system which stores, processes, or retrieves data. Accordingly, it can be important to implement data integrity techniques to ensure data is correctly processed, stored, and retrieved, such that upon later retrieval, the data is correct. Data integrity aims to prevent unintentional changes to information. Any unintended changes to data is failure of data integrity. Changes may occur as the result of a storage operation, retrieval operation or processing operation. These may be cause by malicious intent, unexpected hardware failure, human error, or other causes.
In typical industrial measurement applications, such as energy meters, servers and measurement equipment, data integrity may be an important aspect to the design. Data integrity may be particularly important for systems that relate to isolated power domains. One example of industrial measurement applications where data integrity may be an important aspect to the design is energy meters. The energy meter may measure energy usage information. Energy usage information may be directly related to revenues for the sale or purchase of the energy used. Accordingly, energy measured by the energy meter may be critical information, as it may directly relate to monetary values, which may generally be important aspects of various businesses transactions.